Digital Life & Learning

Disconnected: Youth, New Media, and the Ethics Gap

From the foreward:

Fresh from a party, a teen posts a photo on Facebook of a friend drinking a beer. A college student repurposes an article from Wikipedia for a paper. A group of players in a multiplayer online game routinely cheat new players by selling them worthless virtual accessories for high prices.

In Disconnected, Carrie James examines how young people and the adults in their lives think about these sorts of online dilemmas, describing ethical blind spots and disconnects. Drawing on extensive interviews with young people between the ages of 10 and 25, James explores the nature of their thinking about online privacy, property, and participation.

She discusses three ways that young people approach online activities. A teen might practice self-focused thinking, concerned mostly about consequences for herself; moral thinking, concerned about the consequences for people she knows; or ethical thinking, concerned about unknown individuals and larger communities. James finds, among other things, that youth are often blind to moral or ethical concerns about privacy; that attitudes toward property range from “what’s theirs is theirs” to “free for all”; that hostile speech can be met with a belief that online content is “just a joke”; and that adults who are consulted about such dilemmas often emphasize personal safety issues over online ethics and citizenship. Considering ways to address the digital ethics gap, James offers a vision of conscientious connectivity, which involves ethical thinking skills but, perhaps more important, is marked by sensitivity to the dilemmas posed by online life, a motivation to wrestle with them, and a sense of moral agency that supports socially positive online actions. ISBN: 9780262028066

Out of Eden Learn Information Packet

Out of Eden Learn invites young people and educators to:

- Slow down to observe the world carefully and to listen attentively to others

- Exchange stories and perspectives about people, place, and identity

- Reflect on how their own lives connect to bigger human stories

This information pack offers samples of work from OOEL and offers the methodology behind the OOEL experience.

The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination...

No one has failed to notice that the current generation of youth is deeply—some would say totally—involved with digital media. Professors Howard Gardner and Katie Davis name today’s young people The App Generation, and in this spellbinding book they explore what it means to be “app-dependent” versus “app-enabled” and how life for this generation differs from life before the digital era. ISBN-13: 978-0300196214

Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed: Educating for the Virtues in the Age of Truthiness..

From ancient times, philosophers, theologians, and artists have attempted to describe and categorize the defining virtues of civilization. In Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed, renowned education authority Howard Gardner explores the meaning of the title's three virtues in an age when vast technological advancement and relativistic attitudes toward human nature have deeply shaken our moral worldview. His incisive examination reveals that although these concepts are changing faster than ever before, they are--and will remain, with our stewardship--cornerstones of our society. Designed to appeal to a wide readership, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness Reframed is an approachable primer on the foundations of ethics in the modern age. ISBN: 978-0465031788

Our Space Curriculum

Our Space is a set of curricular materials designed to encourage high school students to reflect on the ethical dimensions of their participation in new media environments. Through role-playing activities and reflective exercises, students are asked to consider the ethical responsibilities of other people, and whether and how they behave ethically themselves online. These issues are raised in relation to five core themes that are highly relevant online: identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility, and participation.